As'ad Ghanem, a professor of Political Science at the University of Haifa appeared on the TV program "Meet the Press" with host Rina Matsliach on Channel Two. Ghanem stated that "Hezbollah, concerning Israel, is a national liberation movement which fought Israel's occupation in Lebanon in 1982. In the Israeli context in my opinion it is not a terrorist organization."
Last Wednesday, a complaint was filed with the police, accusing him of "sympathy, support and solidarity with the Hezbollah terrorist organization" under the Penal Code 1977.
The Ghanem case is important in the unfolding debate on academic freedom in Israel. The police could close the file because of "no public interest" in the issue or take steps against Ghanem.
IAM will follow and report on the case as it unfolds.

The Israel Science Foundation (ISF) has recently announced a job opening for a director of the Social Science grants system (see below in Hebrew). The job description specifically requested a candidate with strong background in quantitative research methods relevant to social sciences.
The announcement upset Dr. Amalia Sa'ar (Anthropology, University of Haifa) who wrote the Social Science Forum to complain about discrimination. She noted that the request for quantitative method specialist was very "alarming" and that "whether it reflects an explicit decision of the Management of the Foundation and whether it reflects a hegemonic worldview... In practice, it means a-priori preference of quantitative research. The Israel Science Foundation is now one of the main funding sources of social science research, especially the theoretical and academic studies. A decision on the preference of quantitative studies significantly harms the ability of qualitative researchers to gain funding from the Foundation."
In order to understand Saar's reaction a broader perspective on Israeli social sciences is needed.
The ISF's decision to help with elevating the level of social science research and teaching is long overdue. In 2013 IAM expressed concerns with the low standing of Israeli social sciences in Western academy. Dr. Yaacov Bergman (HUJ), an expert on higher education, noted that social sciences scored well below average when compared with American and European counterpart. Bergman pointed out the American National Research Council had indicated that the non-scientific political science departments would tend to cluster in the lower end of its ranking. Cutting edge approaches such as rational choice theory, advanced quantitative methods and networking analysis are considered essential for elevating the status of a given department.
But quantitative methods are hardly the norm in Israel.
The International Committee on Evolution of Political Science departments under Professor Thomas Risse that evaluated the Department of Politics and Government at Ben Gurion University, noted the woeful state of quantitative methods there. A similar conclusion was drawn by the committee that evaluated the Department of Sociology at BGU. In both cases, the recommendations urged that "courses should be broadened further to include additional research from quantitatively oriented perspectives". It also stated that "faculty who work from a critical perspective also teach in the organizational sociology track - which raises issues about the minimal exposure of students in this track to empirical and quantitative materials. In general, we remain concerned about the mal-distribution of the faculty over specialties in light of the student enrollment, among other reasons".
Even the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University did not escape censure. The Evaluating Committee noted the meager offerings in quantitative methods, prompting the Department to hire appropriate faculty.
But Sa'ar is not concerned about the standing of Israeli social sciences in the international arena. She writes on her academic webpage: "I am a cultural anthropologist, a senior lecturer and chair of the Department of Anthropology (dept. in the making) at the University of Haifa. I am also a peace and feminist activist." Not surprisingly, a perusal of her research record shows a preoccupation with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict sprinkled with some feminist musings. Most are published in marginal venues.
Significantly, she was promoted without publishing a book, a standard requirement in the social sciences.
As IAM has emphasized numerous times, social sciences in Israel are full of the likes of Amalia Saar who use their positions to push for a political agenda.
The question here is clear: Why should the tax payer support one more radical feminist with a mediocre research record. They have the right to expect excellence in higher education as measured by globally recognized indices.

According to reports, The University of Haifa rejected a proposal to grant Professor Robert Aumann, a Noble Prize laureate, an honorary doctorate. The right wing Institute for Zionist Strategies, where Aumann is a contributing member, speculates that the honorary title was denied because of political considerations. Sources implied that the right-wing views of Professor Aumann contradict the values of the institution.
Political considerations, of course, play a role in decisions to award honorary degrees. Still, over the years, the University has labored under the perception of being the home of a small but radical faculty group.
Recently, a donor wrote to the President, Amos Shapira, to complain about Professor Micah Leshem's anti-Semitic cartoon, uncovered by IAM.
In an age where tertiary education budgets are shrinking, universities depend more than ever on donors. The donor base was badly dented by the Ilan Pappe debacle in early 2000s. As well known, Pappe defended Theodore (Teddy) Katz, an MA candidate, whose finding of an alleged massacre in the village of Tantura in 1948, led to a libel law suit. Pappe used the international network of pro-Palestinian scholar-activists to call for an academic boycott of Israel, a move that prompted British academics to initiative a decade-long boycott of Israel.
By denying Aumann an honorary degree, the University sends a message that it has not moved to mend its financial base. Like any public institution, Haifa University has a fiduciary responsibility to the public and the students to provide the best possible educational services. This mission cannot be accomplished without increasing the flow of outside contributions - something that the leadership needs to ponder when trying to improve its low standing as a research university.
The timing of the two cases creates the unfortunate perception that Leshem's political opinion is somewhat more compatible with the values of Haifa University. The university needs to act to dispel this impression, not to mention that the latest imbroglio will alienate desperately needed donors. Given that its donor base has not recovered from the Ilan Pappe fracas, this should be of urgent importance.

IAM received an email exchange between a donor to University of Haifa and Mr. Amos Shapira, its President, complaining about the anti-Semitic cartoon by Professor Micah Leshem. Mr, Shapira responded that Leshem's activity, however odious, is part of his protected academic freedom.
We wish to point out that Mr. Shapira, like many in the Israeli academy, has an improper understanding of academic freedom.
In both public and private institutions, academic freedom is balanced by academic duties of faculty; in public universities supported by tax payers, the need for accountability is considerable.
Last year, IAM commissioned Professor Ofira Seliktar to produce a study Academic Freedom in Israel: A Comparative Perspective. Her three case-studies - Germany, Great Britain and United States (public universities) - clearly indicate that Israeli faculty enjoy a most expansive version of academic freedom though they are supported by taxpayers.
Equally important, all three countries follow the guidelines included in the EU's "Working Definition of anti-Semitism." According to the document, comparing Israel to Nazi Germany, known as "Nazification of Israel" is not allowed. Specifically, "Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis" and/or "drawing comparison of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis." Ironically, in Israel faculty like Professor Leshem have engaged in such activities with impunity.
The Israeli public and university authorities need to be aware of the proper balance between academic freedom and duty to the institution and the society at large. This is especially important, as the University Haifa has a long history of condoning faculty behavior that does not comport with such a balance and would not be tolerated in other countries. The university is yet to recover from an erosion of its donor base caused by Professor Ilan Pappe and the scandal involving the dissertation of Teddy Katz about the alleged massacre of Palestinians in the village of Tantura in 1948.
Surely, the anti-Semitic cartoon of Professor Leshem is not helpful in this regard.

There was a considerable reaction to our post featuring Micah Leshem (University of Haifa) cartoon.
Here are just a few notes. First, Leshem wrote to thank us for giving publicity to his "important" commentary on the Israeli government.
After receiving reactions from our readers, however, he changed his mind. He now accuses IAM for publicizing his picture and place of employment to encourage harassment by what he described as "your pitiful followers." Though his English is not very clear, he seems to also accuse IAM of "edifying Academic thinking of your hordes. [sic]"
He then states that our main goal of notifying donors did not succeed, because no donors contacted him. We would like to let Professor Leshem know that he is wrong about that. We know of at least one person that wrote to him who is a donor to Israeli universities.
More broadly, as Academic Freedom in Israel in Comparative Perspective indicates, the University of Haifa has never recovered its donor base after the Ilan Pappe/Teddy Katz incident involving fabricated evidence of an alleged massacre in Tantura. Donors at Ben Gurion University reacted in a similar way to provocative statements made by Professor Neve Gordon - putting on hold the much needed expansion and modernization of the library there.
Academic freedom is a sacred principle but it has its limits: it should be counterbalanced by a sense of responsibility to the institution and, in the case of public universities, to the taxpayers and their elected representatives.
There are numerous ways in which faculty can criticize the government. But an anti-Semitic cartoon that bears an uncanny resemblance to the pages of Der Stuermer - published by the notorious Nazi Julius Streicher - is not one of them.
One of the respondents speculated, tongue in cheek, on Professor Leshem's state of mind.
As a rule, IAM does not deal with the psychological motives of radical faculty, but just in case the respondent's critic is right, the academy is not a place for working out private emotions such a hatred and rage.

Normally IAM does not report on anti-Semitic cartoons which populate the Internet along with anti-Semitic diatribes and conspiracy theories.
The cartoon featured below, however, merits attention as it was drawn by Michah Leshem, a professor at Haifa University. Leshem drew the cartoon to illustrate a point he made in English as well as in an Italian language on a pro-Palestinian website.
Of course, as a rank and file citizen, Leshem has the right to produce a most egregious anti Semitic piece that would have found a place of pride in Nazi-era propaganda.
The question is whether Leshem, a professor at a public university supported by taxpayers should engage in this type of behavior. Academics are expected to serve as role models in and out of a classroom. By any measure, Leshem does not live up to such expectations.

who has engaged in numerous pro-Palestinian events that sought to delegitimize Israel. For instance, she signed the letter organized by Anat Biletzki, in 2001, stating that Israeli Academics support their students refusal to serve in the occupied territories . Issued in conjunction with the movement "Courage to Refuse," the petition noted that "Such service too often involves carrying out orders that have no place in a democratic society founded on the sanctity of human life." The letter did not mention that the Israel Defense Force was engaged in fighting a wave of unprecedented terror unleashed by the Palestinians in the wake of the collapse of the Oslo process.
This time around Katriel will present her new research in September in Sweden on "straight talk" of another army refusal group "Breaking the Silence." Judging by her previous positions, it is therefore expected that Katriel will not find the time to condemn terrorism.
Katriel's work is popular with radical scholars, including anarchists. John Petrovato, the former Director of the Institute for Anarchist Studies wrote in his paper "Producing National Identity: Museums, Memory and Collective Thought in Israel" that “Israeli citizens have been trained not to ‘see’ Palestinians. It is not that they are not there but political, visual, cultural, and legal barriers have been erected that obscure the view.” Among others Petrovato attributes his insights on the alleged reality of the conflict to Katriel whom he cites at length.
By producing work that is popular with anarchists and other radical circles whose agenda is political rather than academic, Katriel abuses her academic position.

The following is a response to Dr. Shmulik Lederman from Haifa University who commented on our Executive Summary of Academic Freedom in Israel in Comparative Perspective.
In point number one Lederman states that we provide a "caricature" of the neo-Marxist, critical paradigm and wonder whether we are aware that there is more to it than Israel bashing. We disagree with the characterization of Dr. Lederman, but we are perfectly aware that there is more to it. As a matter of fact, over time we have discussed many facets of critical scholarship, but the Executive Summary is an 8 page distillation of a 200 page document, making it hard to do justice to this highly complex issue.
In point two Lederman mentioned that Edward Said's viewed Zionism as an ethnic national movement. That would have been true for a part of Said's career, but his views seemed to change in over time. Said, a professor of literature, was actually a relative latecomer to the critical paradigm; by his own admission, Said was influenced by the Egyptian Marxist economist Samir Amin, and, more to the point, by Talal Assad and the so-called Hull University groups (whose impact he had never acknowledged). Said's evolving view on Zionism is wrought with complexity and should be studied within the context of these and his subsequent encounters with different strands of critical and colonial theory. In other words, Lederman's point simplifies a very complex issue.
In his third point Lederman finds it "ironically amusing" that our work is politically motivated, while at the same time criticizing radical faculty for being politically motivated.
There is a profound difference between our organization and the scholars that we monitor. We are a non-governmental organization supported by private donation to monitor that scholars do not abuse academic freedom to push a political agenda. We have uncovered plenty of instances of such abuse, including scholars who switch from researching in the field for which they were hired in order to produce essentially polemical work on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or simply cease publishing to engage time political activity. Such practices shortchanges taxpayers who deserve transparency and accountability, not to mention a return on their investment.
In 2002 Dr. Lederman joined the group Courage to Refuse- officers and solders who refused to serve in the territories; although they break the law, we have never addressed his issue.

Radical activists on the road: Dr. Hannah Safran (Emek Yisrael College and U of Haifa) and Dr. Dalia Sachs (U of Haifa) are speaking in New York and New Jersey on behalf of Jewish Voice for Peace, a group that supports BDS.
Over the years, these veteran feminist activists have become radicalized and their view of Israel has changed accordingly. As they see it know, Israel has been an illegitimate creation since 1948 and it is their duty to "resist the machinery of oppression."
To prove their point, Safran and Sachs blatantly twist and misrepresent reality, not to mention that they present things out of context. What they term "spying on professors" is part of the Students Rights Act 2007, which gives students the right to complain about the politicized rhetoric of radical faculty. IAM has carried a number of reports on this topic. Even Prof. Ziva Shamir, the former head of the School of Jewish Studies at Tel Aviv University, accused some activist faculty of turning their classroom into an extension of their political activity. Such faculty use university facilities and even research students to carry out their political work.
Safran and Sachs go on to produce a grab-bag of complaints, which fall short on objective information but long on Israel bashing. Their political statement is either breathtakingly naive or truly mendacious. They proclaim that the feminist movement has matured and overcame their divisions and ask why should the Palestinians and Israelis not do the same. In their eyes, it is Israel that stands in the way of such a rapprochement, never the other side. Interestingly enough, not even the Arab Spring that brought victory to Muslim Brotherhood, a close ally of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, had punctured this vision. In other words, it is only Israeli militarism and oppression that prevented the Jews and Palestinians from achieving a Kumbaya moment in the Middle East.
As for the alleged oppression that Safran and Sachs bring up, there is a serious issue of credibility. By their own admission, they have been engaged in "resistance" since 1983 from the safe perch of the academy and never suffered any consequences. On the contrary, their monthly paycheck and flexible work schedule has given them plenty of time to work on their political agenda. Not a bad arrangement for these two "resistance fighters."

I must add, that typical of dark totalitarian ideologies, you present yourself in terrorist-like balaclavas, KKK-like hoods, spewing forth your venom from behind masks of anonymity.
What a facade of defenders of academic freedom and discourse you present!
Ha! You are jokes.
Micah Leshem

Professor Tamar Katriel (Haifa U, Communications), was profiled by IAM before; alone, or joined by her husband Jacob Katriel (Technion), Katriel has signed endless petitions against Israel and participated in conferences along with other academics who demonized Israel. She assigns dissertation topics to her students that invariably cast a negative light on the Israeli political system. No facet of her work is devoid of efforts to bash Israel.
Her most recent attempt is part of a larger project of radical academics to equate Israel with Nazi Germany. In a review of a book on youth exchanges between Germany and Israel, Katriel write: "The shadow cast by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reintroduces politics and a new version of collectivist spirit into these youth exchanges, putting moral issues and questions of victimhood and responsibility once again at the center of their pursuit of meaningful inter-country dialogue. Participant positioning, however, is very different in this case, when Israelis are required to renegotiate their victim role and take responsibility for their country’s role as military occupier."
For those familiar with the neo-Marxist, critical scholarship paradigm, this comparison is highly meaningful, as it assumes that at the ontological sense, there is no difference between the German occupation and the Israeli one.

Hi Everyone and welcome. Thank you all for coming out tonight. My name is Rabell Afridi and I'm the president of the Muslim Students Association for this year. I want to thank our sponsors for making this event happen tonight. So thank you to the Politics Department and the Middle Eastern Studies department. ...
I'd like to ask professor Stephen Zunes to come up and introduce our speaker for tonight....
Zunes: When I was the age of most of you here, I was involved in a campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions. The target at that time was the apartheid regime in South Africa. ...
They say, Oh yes, there is an Apartheid kind of system going on in the West Bank to be sure but Israel itself, despite discrimination against the Arab minority it's not an Apartheid State quite like South Africa was. Whereas in South Africa foreign direct investment was a primary means of state supported Apartheid South Africa whereas the abilities of our tax dollars go every year to military and economic aid, not to mention vetoes at the United Nations and the like and they seem to be in some ways more important, some of you would argue than how corporations are doing. Nevertheless there is much, we'll be hearing from our guest speaker tonight to be said about the use of Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions as a means of raising awareness, of working to challenge the Israeli occupation, and whether you agree or disagree, it's certainly a perspective that needs to be heard. This disclaimer that we heard before of course has been the policy of this university and virtually all universities for many, many years. Yet it still jumped out that they still felt obliged to say this. I've been teaching here for 15 years. I think it's the first time I ever heard it explicitly read out loud. It's true for every speaker but why it had to be said I think is just an indication that it's a challenge sometimes to raise human rights issues when you are dealing with a strategic ally of the United States. It's fine to criticize human rights records in countries you don't like but when it's a strategic ally suddenly it becomes controversial. I think that its particularly important that we have an Israeli here today who will be making a case for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Not just any Israeli, but a prominent feminist scholar and teacher and activist. She's the cofounder of Who Profits from Occupation. ...
Baum: Thank you so much for having me, for inviting me, thank you (?) for bringing me. And MSA yeah - of course! I actually the talk tonight (?) even though (?) I want us to focus on just a part of it - which is the economic part of it. ...Ok. So, my goal coming here is not really to tell you something coming from Israel or from Palestine. Many times in the past I would come here - every year or two and give a talk - it was kind of a report back about our activism back in Palestine-Israel. I don't think of myself this year as a report back (?) call for action. In fact the activism can be done here (?) and my goal is to give you some background, to try to answer your questions and tell you about the initiatives on board that have been successful. ... I've been an activist in a movement in this country for some years now and the movement also has many names. Some people used to call it the Peace Movement and then the Peace and Justice Movement and then the Free Palestine Movement and then all these different names. We really like to call it now The Democracy Movement. Even when I am active with organizations within what is called 1948, which is the (?) area. We call (?borders?) or the State of Israel. That all of our organizations are joint - Jewish and Palestinian. The idea of having a Jewish only organization inside Israel would be like having a White only anti-racist organization here. So, when we talk about activism in Israel, many times we're talking about joint Palestinian-Jewish organizers. And much of it of course is solidarity work with a Palestinian movement in the occupied Palestinian territories. So to begin with, we're talking about the Palestinian movement - if we are invited, if we are lucky enough to join. So that's the goal

The Taipei Times
Upcoming: People Power in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A View From the Grassroots
Activist and researcher Dalit Baum will give a speech in Taipei on Dec. 10 titled People Power in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A View From the Grassroots. The talk is part of the Lung Yingtai Cultural Foundation’s (龍應台文化基金會) MediaTek TaipeiSalon (台北沙龍) lecture series. Baum cofounded Who Profits From the Occupation (www.whoprofits.org), an online resource providing information about corporate complicity in the occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Her lecture seeks to illustrate how corporations profit from Israel’s control of the Gaza Strip, West Bank and Golan Heights, and how the 3.5 million Palestinians under Israeli military rule have boosted the bottom line of businesses involved in private security, construction, roadblocks, checkpoints and prisons.

Sports: The New Frontier for Post-Zionist Scholarship
Just when it looked that radical academics have used every corner of liberal arts to prove some fault with Israel, sociology of sports has become the next frontier. Whatever the merits of using sports as a measure of ethnic and national co-existence, the authors virtually assure a negative evaluation of Israel through the use a neo-Marxist approach linked to Antonio Gramsci [also known as critical studies]. The state that "taking a Gramscian perspective, some scholars have suggested that sport is a site of contested cultural practices, used by elite groups to maintain and fortify their social dominance." No wonder that they then find that "sport field reflects the tendencies of the larger society, helping to maintain the social dominance of hegemonic groups." Furthermore, they conclude that the sports stars [in Israel] serve mostly as tokens and have no real influence on the social order."
The two authors seem to live in their own new-Marxist reality where individuals are seen as part of a group of either victims or victimizers, where everyone is either a symbol or a token. This self-enclosed reality is reinforced with quotes from other neo-Marxist academics, a common practice in critical scholarship. Even by the standard of the field, this is an extremely poorly- executed research, replete with Marxist jargon befitting a communist party meeting rather than an academic journal.

Dalit Baum (Haifa University) is among a group of radical academics who lead the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. She has participated in a large number of BDS events around the world where she offers workshops on BDS tactics to local activists. Her latest venture is the "Who Profits from the Israeli Occupation," a group dedicated to "exposing Israel's profits from the occupation of Palestinian lands and resources." Who Profits is part of a broader radical-leftist movement of "supporting corporate accountability" in the West. Baum and her colleagues provide information to expose "corporate complicity in the occupation of Palestine" and pressure companies to terminate their involvement in Israeli economy. Who Profits has been successful in pressuring a number of companies to withdraw from projects in Israel.
Even by the standards of her "fraternity," Baum holds extreme views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In her view, Israel is an evil, apartheid state that needs to be punished by the international community; as for the Palestinians, she holds them to be innocent victims of ongoing, brutal Zionist aggression who need all the sympathy the world can offer. This one- sided view is shared by the "corporate accountability movement" which has never pressured companies that do business with some of the most repressive regimes in the world.

Dalit Baum presents a workshop on the economics behind Israel’s occupation of Palestine at the National SJP Conference in New York.
Goals & Objectives
Campaign Building: This conference aims to facilitate and support the advancement of existing campaigns and the development of new campaigns with particular (but not exclusive) emphasis on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS).

Even Haaretz cannot say the truth anymore, writing:"The protests sparked clashes that killed at least 15 people". If it was the Syrian army then it would write "The Syrians killed 15.." If it was Jews that were killed it would be "The Syrians murdered 15 Jews...". Enough of the doublespeak: the IDF killed at least 15 unarmed demonstrators and wounded hundreds in a spree of uncontrolled live fire with complete disregard for the regulations on opening fire (ie only in case of danger to life).

The Israelis are game theorists, so they were very upset that the Palestinians didn’t accept what they viewed as a very generous offer. Since the Palestinians had nothing, the Israelis thought they were irrational. But rejecting a low offer may be rational in the long term. And what we find in laboratory experiments is that the divider usually offers around 40 per cent, which is much higher than what game theory predicts and also higher than what the Israelis have offered. So the Israelis are good game theorists, but they are short-sighted. Because if the game is repeated, it’s not in the weaker party’s interests to accept a low offer. It makes more sense for me to show that I’m not cheap, and that you can’t buy me so easily, even if nobody sees us. Now let’s say others are looking, people I might interact with in the future. If they see me accept a low offer, they might say I’m someone who accepts low offers and I’ll get a reputation. I might even begin to think of myself as cheap too.
Suleiman pointed out that this strategy of sticking to one’s red lines while waiting for a better offer to come along has a name in Palestinian political culture. It is called sumud, or ‘steadfastness’. ‘Sumud, in game theory, is the last line of defence of the weak,’ he said. ‘The weak person has to be steady. If he accepts the unfair situation, it’s like admitting that it’s fair, and the stronger party can take more.’ Israelis may have been angry when the ‘peace process’ collapsed, but Palestinians felt exhilarated because ‘when you reject an insulting offer your dignity is preserved. If you keep your dignity you can’t be walked on, and your chances of survival are increased.’ And if you keep playing the game then the weaker party has the advantage over time. ‘So the Palestinians are right in thinking, game theoretically, that time is on their side.’ It’s less clear whether this strategy will bear fruit outside the university. But as long as Israel continues to put forward offers no Palestinian leader can accept, and as long as the other Arabs are closely watching the two sides play, Palestinians are in no hurry at all.

Educational Bookshop- Discussion on the book titled: “Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel”
07 July 2011
Please join us at 6:30pm at the Educational bookshop to discuss the exceptional book of Abeer Baker and Anat Matar. The book titled “Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel” is an enlightening collection of essays written by prisoners, ex-prisoners, Human rights defenders, lawyers and academic researchers analyzing the political nature of imprisonment and Israeli attitudes towards Palestinian prisoners.

Speakers included Dr Miloon Khothari, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing who spoke about the UN’s efforts to stand up for Palestinian housing rights and Dr Yosef Jabareen, a lecturer on urban studies, who presented detailed information on Israeli violations in occupied areas since 1948; he also spoke about the Israeli Plan named “2020”, a plan to colonise Palestinian lands with Jewish immigrants.
The conference was concluded in unanimous agreement: It is impossible for Palestinians to exercise their rights while living under Israeli occupation. The Occupation as decades have shown brings only abuses to these rights as houses are demolished and land is taken. It was also agreed that a colony-free Palestinian state should be founded on the 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as capital; this would at least allow Palestinians to claw back some of the just rights they deserve.

Dr. Nihad Ali, instructor at the University of Haifa, presented the third paper titled “Deportation from the Point of View of Solidarity”. Dr. Ali discussed the importance of exposing the deportation policy that Israel uses and telling the world about this serious issue; this can be achieved through an act of solidarity with the deportees so as to confront the occupation’s insistence to continue use this policy against the Palestinians. Speakers must spread the world and educate the local, regional and international communities about this issue and its repercussions on the Palestinians’ rights and freedom

Joining the rally was Israeli activist Dalit Baum, who addressed the proposed Human Rights Initiative that would allow members to vote on whether they want the store to support Palestinian human rights by not carrying Israeli products until Israel stops violating those rights.
“People all over the world, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims, are trying to pressure Israel to obey international laws, protect human rights and be a real democracy,” said Baum. “It is heartening to see you here in Sacramento be part of that effort. Boycott and divestment helped South Africa to end apartheid and move to becoming a real democracy. These non-violent strategies can do the same for Israel/Palestine.”

Israel In the Last Decade – A New Phase of the “Jewish State”
Where
The Palestine Center
2425 Virginia Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20037
When
Jun 16 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm
"Israel In the Last Decade – A New Phase of the “Jewish State”"
with
Dr. Asad Ghanem
Professor, University of Haifa
Thursday, 16 June 2011
12:30 - 2:00 p.m.
The Palestine Center

As we cheer on historic people’s uprisings across the Arab world, the Israeli government and The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), its lobbying arm here in the United States, are increasingly worried. This week Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced Israel may ask for an additional $20 billion in military aid—over and above the $3 billion a year Israel already receives—in order to “prepare for possible threats.”
Are they kidding? Enough is enough. U.S. taxpayers have been supporting the Israeli government’s illegal settlements, siege of Gaza, and abuses of Palestinians in large part because our Congress is beholden to the AIPAC lobby. It’s time to break the AIPAC stranglehold.
Our keynote speakers include
Israeli researcher Dalit Baum

The UN Division for Palestinian Rights services the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, a body established by the UN General Assembly. The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People was established in 1975 by the United Nations General Assembly to recommend a programme designed to enable the Palestinian people to exercise their inalienable rights, defined by the General Assembly as the right to self determination, independence and sovereignty; and the right of Palestinians to return to their homes and property.
Uruguayan Capital to Host United Nations Latin American and Caribbean Meeting
in Support of Israeli-Palestinian Peace, 29-30 March
Meeting of Civil Society to Follow at Same Venue, 31 March
Plenary III, on the role of non-governmental actors in Latin America and the Caribbean in promoting a permanent settlement of the conflict, will run from 3 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. on 30 March. The sub-themes will be: “The role of parliamentarians”; “Civil society initiatives and media engagement in the region”; and “The voice of Arab and Jewish communities in Latin America and the Caribbean”. Expected speakers include: Paula Cecilia Merchán, Member of the Argentine Parliament, Buenos Aires; Arlene Elizabeth Clemesha, Professor of Arab Culture, University of São Paulo and Director of International Relations, Institute for Arab Culture, São Paulo; Tilda Rabi, President, Federación de Entidades Argentino-Palestinas, Buenos Aires; and Edy Kaufman, Professor at the International School, University of Haifa.

Dalit is a feminist scholar and teacher in Israel, teaching about militarism and about the global economy from a feminist perspective in the Haifa University and the Beit Berl College.
This year she is visiting the U.S. as an activist in residence with Global Exchange, directing a new program titled Economic Activism for Palestine, which aims to support existing divestment campaigns in the U.S. as well as help new ones through education, training, networking and the development of dedicated tools.

In Tel Aviv we meet Dalit Baum, an Israeli member of the Coalition of Women for Peace and specifically, the group Who Profits? She explains that the organization was developed to understand the economics of the settlement project. A short haired woman
with intense black eyes and an ironic sense of humor, she states that the project aimed to investigate corporations directly involved in the occupation, to figure out the specifics, the financial interests, and who is making money from whom. After meticulous research, four years later they have a website, whoprofits.org, that has a partial data base listing approximately 1000 companies.
The criteria for inclusion on this list involves work in building
settlements, marketing settlement goods, using industrial space within settlements, providing crucial services to settlements such as transportation, and providing equipment to the military such as for building walls and checkpoints. She notes that Israel has exploited the Palestinian labor pool and the Palestinian market, it is a captive market where Israeli policies have shut down much of the competition. For example, Palestinians are only allowed to grow agricultural products that are not as profitable as Israeli products and do not compete in European markets when c mpared to Israeli goods.

On December 10th, Dirasat, together with the Arab Minority Rights Clinic at the Law Faculty at the University of Haifa released its most recent research report. "Education on Hold: Israeli Government Policy and Civil Society Initiatives to Improve Arab Education in Israel" summarizes the state of Arab-Palestinian education over the last decade. It found that although a number of new and promising ideas have been initiated by the Ministry of Education and by NGOs, their potential remains unrealized and Arab education continues to be in a state of crisis. The report is authored by Dr. Yousef T. Jabareen and Dr. Ayman Agbaria of Dirasat and the University of Haifa

Israeli academic, Dalit Baum from the “Who Profits?” research project presented testimony at the London Tribunal on Sunday. He said that the complicity of British-Danish firm involved human rights abuses at the notorious Ofer prison in the occupied West Bank.
Merav Amir, from Who Profits?, an Israeli organization which is dedicated to expose those who stand to benefit from the occupation, said it knew that the firm did not directly engage itself in torture, has created the circumstances required for the abuse.

The two-day event at the Law Society will continue on for a third day – Monday – at the offices of Amnesty International in London.
Organizers said the “tribunal” would examine “international corporate complicity in Israel’s violations of international human rights law, international humanitarian law, and war crimes.”
A number of Israeli academics and activists are set to join anti-Israel counterparts to castigate Israel and the organizations and companies that trade with it – with a host of Israeli and international companies accused of complicity not represented or able to defend themselves.
On Saturday, the University of Haifa’s Dr. Dalit Baum and Hugh Lanning, from the radical fringe group Palestine Solidarity Campaign, were scheduled to speak about business practices in relation to settlements and the settlement industry.
On Sunday, Tel Aviv University’s Merav Amir is to speak on the connection of Israeli and international finance companies “to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.”
Shir Hever (Son of Hebrew University Prof' Hannan Hever), from Jerusalem’s Alternative Information Center, a pro-Palestinian campaign group, who said that Israeli mechanisms are used by other countries after being tested on Palestinians, will speak about the Elbit Systems defense manufacturer and “its role in [Israeli] security practices.”

Dr Ghanem, who belongs to Israel's Palestinian minority, a fifth of
the country's population, noted that the original goal of Israel's
founders was to use a sophisticated version of divide-and-rule
political tactics to weaken an emerging Palestinian national movement that opposed Zionism.
The war of 1948 that created Israel led to the first and most
significant division: between the minority of Palestinians who
remained inside the new territory of Israel and the refugees forced outside its borders, who today number at least 4.7 million, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
Since 1967, Israel has fostered many further splits: between the
cities and rural areas; between the West Bank and Gaza; between East Jerusalem and the West Bank; between the main rival political movements, Fatah and Hamas; and between the PA leadership and the diaspora.

A new fast train line is planned to connect Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Israel’s two main metropolitan centers, with two or
three trains an hour, in a 28-minute route. This new train line, sometimes referred to as the A1 train, is one of the biggest
infrastructure projects that the Israeli government has undertaken in the last decade. The route crosses official state
borders into the occupied West Bank in two areas, using occupied Palestinian land, some of it privately owned, for
an Israeli transportation project aimed exclusively for Israelis.
Part 1 of the report follows the planned route of the railway and its implications. It discusses the planning process and
the legal considerations concerning the route, describes the situation of the Palestinian communities most affected by
the route and provides firsthand accounts by the residents.
By crossing the Green Line border into the West Bank, the A1 train line is unlawful and unethical. According to international
law, an occupier may not use the occupied resources solely for the benefit of its own citizens. This line was planned for
the exclusive use of Israeli citizens; it is imposed on the local Palestinian residents by the dictates of a military regime, in
which they have no representation; and it would be completely inaccessible to the local residents.

Sarcastically, they write: "For Avineri, the major threat faced by Israel is not at all the growth of anti-democratic forces within it, nor what Israel has been doing during its 43-year occupation and colonisation. Nor is it the harsh discrimination and exclusionary policies of the state against its Arab citizens. No, the major threat he sees is Israeli Jews committing themselves to full equal rights for their fellow Arab citizens.
"How logical is it for the majority to be frightened of itself?" Ghanem and Saban continue. "How can the Majority, which has in its hands the social, economic, cultural and military power, the political and legal authority, seriously justify its fear of losing control of its own destiny?"

In 1990 sociologist and Haifa University Prof. Sammy Smooha borrowed the term "ethnic democracy" from Juan Jose Linz, a political sociologist at Yale University, and applied it to Israel. Over the years, Smooha developed and perfected an analysis that placed Israel very low in the hierarchy of democratic governments. Comparing it with liberal, republican, consociational and multicultural democracies, he concluded that Israel did not fit into any of these categories. Instead, along with states like Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia, it could be classified as an "incomplete" or "low-grade democracy."

Tonight at 19:30, non-cooperation and violence of the authorities: An open discussion about effective tools for our struggles
The Flotillas, the boycotts, the shared demonstrations and the direct actions: if it works - when and how?
How to catch the momentum of the boycott of the actors? The disobedient of Ilana Hammerman? What can a boycott cause? What are our short term purposes?
We'll try to analyse the organizations around us and test the strategies and their effectiveness.
Host: Dalit Baum

New Haifa University rector, his predecessor speak out against their colleagues' endorsement of artists' boycott of city located beyond Green Line. 'Some Israeli academics live in glass houses, shattering the basis for their existence,' one professor says

HAIFA (Ma'an/Agencies) -- Students at Haifa University reportedly prepared a list of "Pro-Palestinian" professors and a group of activists were preparing a boycott campaign targeting their classes and lectures.
Israel's Hebrew Language daily newspaper Ma'ariv said a campaign began on Tuesday, targeting 20 lecturers from the sociology and political science departments who they said "participate in demonstrations against Israeli troops and the Israeli government" or who have publicly spoken out against them.

The video below includes an interview with Dalit Baum of Who Profits, the project of Israel’s Coalition of Women for Peace that documents which companies profit from Israel’s occupation. The proposed law would put the Coalition out of business, mandating that any Israeli who promotes boycotts be held liable for economic losses suffered by an Israeli company because of the boycott.

Dr. Raef Zreik and Advocate Abeer Baker, the Faculty of Law, the University of Haifa
Dr. Fawzi al-Asmar (Ph.D. from the University of Exeter)
Dr. Mohammed Abu Nimer, Professor in the International Peace and Conflict Resolution program at the School of International Service and Director of the Peacebuilding and Development Institute at American University, Washington DC

From there, the University of Haifa professor of political science took a fairly pro-Hamas stance to Areikat's default pro-Fatah stance, and the room appeared divided between Abbas-government supporters and those more skeptical of the Palestinian Authority.
Ghanem was unapologetic in his assertions about politics within and without Palestine. Regarding the flotilla attack the Monday before, Ghanem said this proves Israel is not interested in peace. The upside however, he said, is that Israel has been tarnished in the eyes of the international community, and this is thanks to the resistance efforts of Hamas.

On February 25th, Asa’d Ghanem will be our guest on “CNI: Jerusalem Calling,” the CNI Foundation’s internet-radio show. Ghanem will join CNI board member and host Alison Weir to discuss George Mitchell’s peace efforts in the Middle East, the idea of transferring land and population to a future Palestinian state in exchange for retaining the largest Jewish settlements, and the erosion of the rights of Israeli-Palestinians in comparison to the rights of Jewish-Israelis.
Dr. Asa’d Ghanem is a lecturer at the School of Political Sciences, University of Haifa. In the context of Israel/Palestine, Ghanem’s work has covered issues such as Palestinian political orientations, the establishment and political structure of the Palestinian Authority, and majority-minority politics in a comparative perspective. He has been the initiator and designer of several policy schemes and empowerment programs for Palestinian-Arabs in Israel.
Dr. Ghanem has authored and edited numerous articles and books, including the following: Palestinian Politics After Arafat: A Failed National Movement (Indiana University Press, 2009); Ethnic Politics in Israel – The Margins and the Ashkinasi Centre (Routledge Press, 2010); Palestinians in Israel – Indigenous group politics in the Jewish state (Madar, 2008, in Arabic).Also, check out the archived versions of our show by clicking on this tab on the left-hand toolbar. Past shows archived there include conversations with Gideon Levy, Mustafa Barghouti, Stephen Walt, End the Occupation’s Josh Ruebner… and many more.

It is not enough for Palestinians to merely monitor and record the transformations going on around them; they must go further and begin to actively interfere with the formulation of production and maintenance schemes in Jerusalem. The resistance strategy of intervention is based on community-level organization and institutionbuilding., These institutions will serve to represent the interest and identity of the Palestinian people in their dealings with Israeli authorities and will, in turn, rely upon the international laws and norms that require the occupier to defend certain rights and liberties of the occupied., A process of defense and civilian resistance in the urban space, one that contributes to the empowerment of people through their conscious participation, needs to be developed. Rather than participation offering legitimacy to Israeli control, an active popular movement can at once make real policy achievements, while also strengthening the identity and attachment of Palestinians with the Old City and its surroundings."

Dalit Baum, PhD, teacher at Haifa University and Beit Berl College in Israel, Israeli feminist anti-occupation activist, and Coordinator of "Who Profits from the Occupation," a project of the Coalition of Women for Peace, will discuss tools for holding corporations accountable for their profiteering from the Israeli occupation, with lessons from the international movement, through the research and resources of whoprofits.org

also completely reject the legend, carefully fostered by the Zionist establishment, that the Jews of Iraq had been in terrible danger, from which a brilliant rescue operation saved them. Without downplaying the attacks on the Jews, it is a fact that they refused to emigrate till the early 1950s, when the government passed a law allowing Jews wishing to immigrate to Israel to renounce their Iraqi citizenship. The option was available for only one year, and the response was not strong – until bombs went off in synagogues and other Jewish institutions.
Who threw the bombs in Baghdad? I do not know, in fact maybe nobody now knows, but I can safely say that many of the Iraqi Jews have no doubt about who did it and who reaped the great benefit when more than one hundred thousand Iraqi Jews hastened to immigrate to Israel.

Members of the selection committee: Asad Ghanem, Norma Masriyah, Aziz Haidar, Musleh Kanaaneh, Shawqi Alayasa
The 2009 Al-Awda Award launched multiple activities and events across Palestine and the world commemorating the 1948 Nakba in which a majority of Palestinian were expelled from their homeland. These activities and events pointed to the ongoing nature of the Nakba, the fact that Palestinian refugees have not been allowed to return to their home despite the international community's consensus on the legitimacy of this right, and the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinians throughout historic Palestine.
Badil has committed to disseminate the works of these Awda Award winners through various media.The winning poster has been adopted by the Nakba Commemoration Committee as the official poster for this year's Nakba commemoration activities. Those interested should continue to check our website as we publish the pieces of written journalism, the children's stories, and research papers through various Badil publications.
We thank all of those who participated in the 2009 Al-Awda Award, including juries, awards committee, and of course the brilliant Palestinian participants themselves who have proved once again that the spirit of talent and creativity can not be caged by any oppressor.

Yali Hashash, a researcher at Haifa University, said attempts to restrict Ethiopian women’s fertility echoed practices used against Jewish women who immigrated to Israel from such Arab countries as Iraq, Yemen and Morocco in the state’s early years, in the 1950s and 1960s. Many, she said, had been encouraged to fit IUDs when the device was still experimental because Israel’s leading gynecologists regarded Arab Jews as “primitive” and incapable of acting “responsibly”.

Treated as second-class citizens in Israel and left out of Palestinian national representative structures, this population continues to grow in number and political dynamism. What do the Palestinian citizens of Israel think about a negotiated solution to the conflict, the Right of Return, and their future status? How can/should this constituency participate in the decision making processes that will ultimately provide an answer to their national question?
"Palestinian Citizens in Israel: Stakeholders in Limbo?"

Shavua Tov, I would like to remind those who were annoyed by the one-sided report of Judge Goldstone, that tomorrow it will be possible to learn about what happened in Gaza during the last war from first hand source - Soldiers who took part in the war. 'Breaking the Silence' will bring evidence from those soldiers in an event which will take place in Sfadia Auditorium at the multi-purpose bulding, tomorow, Monday 30th November at 16:30.
The campus croud is invited. If you know of people outside the campus wishing to attend please ask them to write me as there is a need to get permission to attend for outsiders.
Please circulate to those who might be interested who don't subscribe to these lists
Yuval

Dr. Asad Ghanem, Professor of Political Science, University of Haifa
Wednesday, 2 December 2009 12:30 - 2:00 p.m. The Palestine Center
Treated as second-class citizens in Israel and left out of Palestinian national representative structures, this population continues to grow in number and political dynamism. What do the Palestinian citizens of Israel think about a negotiated solution to the conflict, the Right of Return, and their future status? How can/should this constituency participate in the decision making processes that will ultimately provide an answer to their national question? The speakers will explore these questions with a presentation of recently conducted public opinion data, commentary and analysis.

In her talk she would discuss the grassroots research initiative "Who Profits" www.whoprofits.org, present its mapping of corporate involvement in the occupation, and tell the story of specific discoveries and challenges in on-going campaigns.

As'ad Ghanem: "The close connection between Adalah and the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee - a partnership that has included representatives of the Arab leadership who deal with a broad spectrum of issues that come up in Israel's courts - makes the Adalah proposal to a large extent one that faithfully represents the Arab public in Israel. By means of this proposal, the Arab community is determining the outlines of the constitution that is
acceptable to it, and preventing attempts to legislate a discriminatory one by making these attempts illegitimate both in the eyes of the Arab community and in terms of international law..."
Overall, the report shows that the legal authorities all joined together and applied the concept of “no tolerance, no leniency”. People who did not have any criminal record, found themselves imprisoned for prolonged periods for voicing their protest against the brutal, oppressive military attacks.
The UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (“the Goldstone Committee”), which investigated the breaches of international criminal, humanitarian and human rights law in the Gaza Strip during the military aggression and released its report on 15 September 2009, extensively cites information from Adalah’s report. The UN report devoted a full chapter to the suppression of protests by Israel.

6 PM - Author and Israeli dissident, Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi will speak on
"FIRST PRINCIPLES: UTOPIA AND INJUSTICE IN PALESTINE/ISRAEL".
He is the author of Original Sins: Reflections on the History of Zionism and Israel.
Co-sponsored by US Campaign to End the Occupation

Join the US Campaign to Mark the 4th Anniversary of the Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS
July 9-10, 2009
Join us for a lecture and book signing by Prof. Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi on Thursday, July 9

we will deal with the nature of the current relationship between Jews and Palestinians, inequality and discrimination of the Palestinians by the Establishment. We will also discuss ways of defining the character of the State of Israel and the attempts at compromise and dialogue between Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Lindh went as far as blaming Israel for "crimes against
humanity". That is the worst charge one can make and as far as I can remember no other senior serving EU official ever did that. It
effectively puts Israel in the same category as the Nazis or other
genocide perpetrators.

The only man in Israel deemed worthy of writing it is Dr. As'ad Ghanem, who by chance or not, was also the main drafter of a document entitled "The Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel." This document includes these civic pearls: "Israel is the outcome of a colonialist action which was initiated by the Jewish-Zionist elites ... [it] was established by colonial states ... it continues conflicting with its neighbors incessantly ... and implementing a colonialist policy ... Israel cannot be defined as a democratic state. It can be defined as an ethnocratic state ... the state must acknowledge responsibility for the Nakba ... [it] should recognize the Palestinian Arabs as an indigenous national group that has a right to choose its representatives directly." It also says that each side should run its own affairs and have a right to veto the other's decisions.
Ghanem advances these opinions, although less blatantly, in the civics textbook as well. In the part about the War of Independence he ignores the bloody Arab attacks before the war, including their refusal to accept the UN Partition Plan and the war they began a few hours after Israel's Declaration of Independence. Everything that happened in those days is "an accelerated conflict between Jews and Arabs ... which became more violent." The Jews, and only the Jews, are to blame for causing the refugee problem.

May 2009, BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights - Bethlehem, Palestine. BADIL is proud to announce the winners of the 2009Al-Awda Award, the third annual public competition of its kind. The award aims to foster Palestinian talent and creativity and to raise the profile of the Palestinian Nakba and the right of all forcibly displaced Palestinians to return to their homes and lands.
Category: Research Papers
Members of the selection committee: Asad Ghanem, Norma Masriyah, Aziz Haidar, Musleh Kanaaneh, Shawqi Alayasa

Within a few hours after the brutal attack on Gaza began, the Coalition of Women for Peace mobilized more than 1,500 women and men in a protest against the bombardment. Throughout the 22 days of the massacre in the Gaza Strip, the group helped to bring the voice of resistance within Israel to the Israeli public and to the international community.
Come hear two women who participated in the protests offer reflections on the relationship between the war, gender, protest and security.

Summary: OUTLINE: (1) challenge to get involved; (2) coverage of, and comments on, Israel's murderous illegal siege of the population of Gaza; (3) interview with Professor Baum on the issue of corporations profiting from Israel's siege program; (4) closing remarks
Notes: This Week In Palestine (a weekly part of Truth and Justice Radio) is a three-quarter-hour segment of news from Palestine and discussion of issues relevant to the Palestinians' struggle for freedom from Israel's brutal military occupation and colonization, and now bombing, of their homeland.

Our magazine "In an Occupying Society" deals with the social and economic implications of the occupation on society and on the public in Israel.
This chapter discusses Militarism.
Dalit Baum hosting Dr. Diana Dolev [Holon Technology Institute]

The lawyer Jabareen provides ample evidence, including the continued aggression against the civilians and other civilians, and excessive use of military force, and the use of weapons of mass destruction on land, sea and air in the populated areas.
He continued: Israel "did not hesitate to bomb peaceful civilians within the institutions of the United Nations, and the targeting of ambulances and safe houses in the sector."
Jabareen the lawyer and lecturer at the University of Haifa, said on the
very urgent need to document the Israeli violations of international law and to provide evidence backed by live testimony, so that the opening of an international investigation against those involved.

As more people around the world have become aware of Israel's abuse of the rights of Palestinians -- both with its recent attack on Gaza and its violent, restrictive and humiliating occupation of the West Bank -- there is growing interest in targeting the economic underpinnings of Israel's power and control.
A longstanding Israeli political organization, the Coalition of Women for Peace, has spent the past two years researching three issues related to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land: industries located within the illegal settlements of the West Bank, the economic exploitation of Palestinians, and the companies that help Israel enforce its brand of apartheid. The group has recently launched a website called "Who Profits from the Occupation," detailing the activities of some 200 Israeli and international companies.
Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Dalit Baum, who teaches feminist theory at Haifa University and is project coordinator for Who Profits from the Occupation.

AG: While the Palestinians in Israel are second class citizens who live on the margins of Israeli political, social, cultural and economic life, Palestinians in the so called "mixed cities" are on the margins of the margins, being at the edges of the Palestinian community in Israel in many ways. In comparison to life in most developed countries, even the other parts of Palestine, and life before al-Nakba in 1948, those in “mixed cities” are in many ways worse off. They tend to receive a very low level of education and suffer from a high level of unemployment. Drug use, divorce, discrimination and neglect from these municipal authorities in their cities makes life in “mixed cities” especially difficult for Palestinian citizens. This compounds the discriminatory state policies that are directed towards the entire Palestinian society in Israel.
Many Jewish Israelis hold what could only be called racist views towards the Palestinian citizens. Reports from Akka in the last few days make it clear that most of the Jewish vandals and rioters are those who hold very extreme stands against Palestinians in general and those who hold Israeli citizenship in particular. A large portion of them were settlers who moved to Akka following the Israeli withdrawal of Gaza. They came to Akka as part of the Judaization efforts to increase the Jewish population in Akka. This parallels the goal of transferring the remaining Palestinians from Akka to other parts of the country. The background to this phenomenon is rooted on the general framework of the "Jewish State" policies towards the Palestinian minority, the growing debate in Israel regarding the danger of changing demographics and the vocal stands against the Palestinian minority within the Israeli establishment, including government ministers and members of the Knesset.

I demand you take off this posting at once and post instead in the same place an apology for presenting baseless facts of my opinions. There is nothing in this article and not in the abstract of any support in the Right of Return. I expect this apology to stay on the website and to be circulated to the public in the same way as the original one was. Ron Kuzar

The term return is used in the English texts of contemporary Palestinian political authors writing on the Right of Return of Palestinians to their homes and homeland. The first part of this article is dedicated to a semantic analysis of return as a radial category with a core meaning and extensions. The meanings of return in these texts as used in the discourse of Palestinian maximalists versus pragmatists are then discussed. It is shown that: (1) different meanings of return are selected according to whether the writer is a maximalist or a pragmatist, and (2) a reality that harmonizes with these meanings is narratively constructed.

Adalah – in cooperation with Adv. Hassan Jabareen: preparation off undamental appeal regarding confidential evidence in the criminal process.
Preliminary legal and factual research and preparation of the appeal.
Association for Civil Rights in Israel – in partnership with
Adv. Auni Banna: preparation of civil-damages claim regarding
discrimination based on nationality in the entrance to public places and institutions
...Mossawa Center – in partnership with Adv. Rajya Abu Akel: preparation of a legal opinion paper regarding standing during the anthem – Shizaf High School received a disciplinary punishment distancing it for two years from the Ministry of Education's sports competitions because students did not stand during the playing of the anthem.
Independent project of the clinic: establishment of an
authority/commission for the rights of the Arab minority, "commission for equality", with Knesset members. As discernable, the work of the clinic is diverse regarding the legal strategies and types of actions.
The work includes: litigation at different stages of the process
(including preliminary research for the preparation of an appeal, and legal wording of materials that have been collected in the process of former legal actions); local and comparative legal research for a media campaign; formulation of a position paper or activity to change tendencies of policy makers and legislative lobby. The activity will expose students to civil society organizations and to the reality in the field throughout collection of data and preliminary research.
During the second semester additional projects will be devised
together with other organizations (I'lam, Follow-Up Committee on Arab Education).

Dr. Asad Ghanem, the chairman of the ICDS, told Haaretz yesterday that the project is the first of its kind to involve Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Lebanon and Syria.
"There's a double message here: Firstly, that we are one people with one Nakba; secondly, that the status of the Palestinians in Israel supports the Palestinian national movement," Ghanem, a senior faculty member at the University of Haifa, said. "There are fields in which we don't need to wait for the Jewish establishment, and one of these is education."

One of the participants in the SOAS conference was Asad Ghanem, an Israeli Arab who teaches political science at Haifa University. He argues that the Jewish settlement project has made an equitable two-state solution virtually impossible. Instead, he advocates a binational state, in which Israelis and Palestinians have separate parliaments for domestic affairs and a joint parliament for affairs of state. There would be a joint police force and a joint army, although he says he would be ready for Israeli Jews to have a built-in predominance in the military as reassurance in the face of a large and potentially daunting Arab world.
According to Ghanem, this binational arrangement would have several major advantages: Jewish settlements could remain in place, since there would be no territorial issue; Arab refugees could return, as there would be no demographic issue; Israeli Arabs would be able to identify with the Palestinian collective to which they belong, and not be seen as a potentially subversive fifth column in Israel; and both Israelis and Palestinians would be able to express their national aspirations. "I say if we can't have two states, let's start looking at the option of
equitable power sharing as the basis for peaceful coexistence in a single state. I understand Zionism is a movement seeking national expression for the Jewish people. There is no reason why this goal cannot be achieved in a binational set-up," he avers.

This book has examined the connections first of radical Zionism, and second, of the form in which it penetrated the state, with the Nazis and other groups of fascist tendencylinks that will surely surprise most readers. We've also stressed the important links between certain radical circles in the Israeli administration and post-war fascists. During the Cold War, dictators and juntas all over the globe gladly established close, yet often highly confidential, working relationships with certain circles in the Israeli administration.
That these circles influential in the Israeli administration support fascist regimes and organizations worldwide is established in detail by Israeli writer Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. According to his book The Israeli Connection: Whom Israel Arms and Why, Israel has insured the "stability" by supporting oppressive regimes all over the world.

Katz came also to tell about the obliteration of Tantura and 552 other Palestinian coastal villages conducted by the Israeli military after their victorious war of 1948. Katz begins his talk this way:
"I like Israel. I want to be an Israeli citizen on [into the future]. But I dislike very much everything being done by the Israeli government, for generations. Every time I have more and more against what my government is doing. First of all, to ourselves, Israelis. And then, also, to Palestinians. Because they kill Palestinians -- but they make our citizens [into] killers and very, very bad characters." April 14, 2005 St. Bonaventure University, Olean, NY A SNOWSHOEFILMS PRODUCTION yoryevrah (The 90 min. video can be seen on snowshoefilms(dot)com

In his recently released book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Pappe claims that Israel prepared a special plan for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's Arab population known as Plan D for dalet. Pappe's "evidence" is derived from his interpretations of files found in the Hagana and Israel state archives...But Pappe makes one egregious mistake. He never bothers to ask the same question of the Arabs he does of the Jews: What about their lists, their intelligence reports and their ethnic-cleansing plans? What were Arab intentions in the five months between the passage of the UN partition plan on November 29, 1947, and the birth of Israel?
.

Pappe outlines Plan D (Dalet in Hebrew), which followed earlier plans A, B and C, and included forcible expulsion of some 800,000 Palestinians from both urban and rural areas with the objective of creating by any means necessary an exclusive Jewish state without an Arab presence. The methods ranged from a campaign of disinformation -- “get out immediately because the Jews are on their way to kill you” -- to Jewish militia attacks to terrorize the Palestinians.
... There is no doubt in Pappe’s mind that Plan D “was a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity.”

Like those enlightened pundits who used liberal organs in the United Kingdom, such as The Guardian, to explain to us at length how dangerous is the proposed academic boycott on Israel. They have never expended so much time, energy or words on the occupation itself as they did in the service of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. UNISON, Britain’s large public service trade union, must not be deterred by this backlash and it should follow these brave academics who endorsed the debate on the boycott, as should Europe as a whole: not only for the sake of Palestine and Israel, but also if it wishes to bring a closure to the Holocaust chapter in its history.
... To its credit one should openly say that the means used by Hamas are part of an arsenal that enabled it in the past to be the only active force that at least tried to stop the total destruction of Palestine

A Fund run by the Islamic Movement student group linked to Hamas, says terror expert
..."Jewish students and other elements at (Haifa) University are protesting the rising Islamification on campus. They say Islamist rhetoric can be found across the institution," Yedioth Haifa reported last Friday. .."There was also a diary handed out by the Islamic Movement here with pictures of Bin Laden, the burning Trade Towers, and Hassan Nasrallah," Sa'ar Ziv, the student's union spokesperson, told Ynetnews.

(Original spelling, uncorrected)
Yonay: 'Attached is a disturbing story from yesterday (sic) local
newspaper. It might serve a model in fascist classes how to use use (sic) half truths, straight lies, fears and demagogy to foster polarization and hatred. Arab students (who, for the authors, are all muslims (sic), as all Hadah (sic) supporters are) dare to be visible; they are threatening because they put Che Gavara (sic) on their shirts; they are politically active -- what a cynical exploit (sic) of democracy. They can demonstrate everywhere and whenever they want (in reality, they can demonstrate for 2 hours every week, on Mondays and Wednesday, 11:45-12:15 and 13:45-14:15). It is also their fault that there are no dukhanim of Jewish organization. In short, you don't have to learn fascism to talk like Gobbles (sic).
I hope our spokeperson (sic) do (sic) something about it.'
Yuval

More than 80% of the students in Israeli higher-education system are Jewish… this fact is not felt on the Haifan campus… Students complain that extreme Arab students distribute materials on the verge of incitement/vilification ['hasata'; in fact, students need to submit everything they distribute—even an invitation to an academic event—for approval by the Dean of students Office; sometime distribution is delayed because there is no one who knows Arabic available]. .''
... Unfortunately the university encourages this in the name of the freedom of speech, but it verges on cynical exploitation. With their shirts carrying the images of Azmi Bishara and Che Guevara they seem like soldiers on the eve of a battle [the similarity of what the anonymous official and the anonymous student said throws doubt on the authenticity of both cited quotes]....We often hear from students, employees, and even [the supposed to be leftist Palestinian sympathizers] that they feel as if the University of Haifa were a branch of Bir Zeit (Palestinian college).'

The ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Israel was not an unintended
consequence, or fortuitous occurrence, or even a "miracle", as Israel's first president Chaim Weitzmann later proclaimed. "It was the result of long and meticulous planning," wrote Illan Pappe, Professor of Political Science at Haifa University, in his recent book "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine" (2007).
... Illan Pappe stressed that these massacres were part and parcel of a deliberate and well-devised Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse the bulk of Palestinian Arabs from their ancestral homeland..

The Interior Ministry responded by saying that Dar al-Hanun was an "unrecognized" place of residence, comprising illegal structures, which were constructed in the middle of wild scenic lands. "Illegal structures cannot constitute justification for forming new settlements," the ministry said.

Professor Kobi Peter, an activist in Ta'ayush, doubts the state will be able to adhere to this stance for much longer. "Obviously, they will have to reach some sort of settlement which will allow the residents to live on their land," he said.

Among Oz's extra-curricular activities is his running an anti-Israel, anti-Semitic chat list named "ALEF" ("Academic Left"), whose members include some of the worst neo-Nazis and anti-Semites on the planet, some of them Jewish. ALEF operates under the auspices of the University of Haifa and is hosted on the University of Haifa computer. A good idea of the nature of ALEF can be derived from the fact that its members engage in debates over whether or not Hitler was "guilty" of anything, and also post praise there for David Irving. Oz only intervenes in the list debates when pro-Israel material is posted there inappropriately.
Because of his devotion to denouncing his own country and hosting neo-Nazis and anti-Semites on his chat list, Oz is celebrated by them, ranging from Al-Ahram to communist web sites and neo-Nazi web magazines.

Yonay: 'For many years Jews commemorate their pain and loss on the Rememberance Day and Celebrate their Joy on Independence Day, as exclusive events of the Jewish population in Israel
On the other hand, Arabs in Israel got used to hide and suppress their pain for the great loss they have suffered '

Israeli academic accuses campus groups of being 'ambassadors of Israel'.
He said: "Muslim anger is directed at them not because they are Jews but because of their unqualified support for the state of Israel, which Muslims see as an oppressive country."
Professor Pappe, who previously accused Israel of "ethnically cleansing" Palestinians and supported a boycott of Israeli academics, was responding to suggestions that Jewish students were under increasing threat from anti-Semitism on campus.

British Jewish leaders have spoken of their concern after a Haifa University lecturer who has called for a boycott of Israeli academics, was made Chair of History at Exeter University in the south of England

Leshem: 'That is the legacy, the inherent contradiction, and the logical outcome of Zionism preaching a Jewish state. It was probably a wrenching requirement in the darkest period of our history, buttressed by the mores and rulers of the time, but why, today, we cannot be a Democratic State where the (majority) Jews can have whatever ethnic-religious-community services we require without incessantly oppressing and dispossessing other humans is beyond me. Do we really need Jewish-only soldiers. Jewish-only policemen, Jewish only politicians, Jewish-only electricity workers, Jewish-only lecturers, Jewish-only students, Jewish-preferring laws, Jewish only land rights, and in addition, command unwavering allegiance to the one, state sanctioned, all-pervading ideology  in order for us to live in a country where our children can be decently educated, which is clean and green, where health and social services are equitable and effective, where our future is considered, planned, and invested, where our culture can once more be respected, and which can join the community of nations on an equal footing?
The evidence speaks quite emphatically to the contrary.'
Micah

On March 11, the University of Haifa held a one-day conference on the Deir Yassin "Massacre". The conference was in fact a one-sided indoctrination session, which never challenged any of the lies about what the Arabs claim happened in Deir Yassin. Most of the speakers were Arabs, including such people as Knesset Member Azmi Bishara, who regularly travels to Lebanon and Syria in order to cheer on terrorism and call for Israel's
annihilation, and Knesset Member Muhammad Baraka, arguably even worse than Bishara. For balance, the conference featured Uri Avnery, who has devoted his life to promoting anti-Zionism and to delegitimizing the existence of Israel, and Prof. Tamar Katriel, wife of Jacob Katriel, both Stalinist anti-Zionists. There were several other Jewish speakers who discussed the "massacre" at Kfar Kassam, from the Arab point of view of course

One can also argue with whoever is not interested in values or is indifferent to moral and ideological positions, that without an Israeli recognition of the Right of Return and its implementation in a manner that will be acceptable to the refugees or their representatives, all the attempts at reconciliation will collapse, as indeed it already happened during the Oslo process that shattered into splinters at the Camp David Summit during the summer of 2000.
However, the refugee problem is much more than a proper or improper solution to the ethnic cleansing committed by Israel during 1948. This problem underscores the basis for the understanding of the entire Zionist Project in its current garb. ...The Israeli and the international moral position has been eroded to such an extent that there is no longer an Israeli fear of condemnation or a Jewish desire for forgiveness....
...Whoever understands this knows the disparity between the depth of the crime that was committed here in 1948 and the weakness of the Palestinian desire for revenge.
But how many like this are there here today?

The Israel Debate
Is Israel guilty of ethnic cleansing? Dr Ilan Pappe, called by some as the "most hated Jew in Israel", says yes. But fellow Israeli Professor Efraim Karsh says he is "fabricating history."

Pappe: The cleansing of the Jewish space or the area of Palestine that all the Zionist parties, including the liberal ones, covet as a State, is a pillar in Zionist thought. ... After all, it was liberal Zionists who committed the greatest act of ethnic cleansing so far, the 1948 one, and a pure Jewish space is accepted by liberals as well, as a noble target. They are willing to be happy with a smaller part of the land for achieving this goal but there their liberalism ends. This is why there is ‘no rush’ and in fact it is a liberal Zionist concept that a slow measure nowadays is best for silencing world criticism or internal doubts.

"We have found a serious expression of stereotypical thinking on the Jewish students' part regarding the Arab youth," said Dr. Kupermintz, who pointed out that 69 percent of the Jewish students think that Arabs are not smart.
Willingness to meet with Jewish students
"These students come in with firm stereotypical baggage regarding the other, and in this case, this is the Arabs," said Kupermintz.

A group of concerned Israeli citizens has determined to protest this injustice which stands in gross contradiction to Israel’s self-declared image of a democratic state supportive of human rights and aspiring to a peaceful resolution of its conflict with the Palestinian people. We, the members of the Israel Committee for the Right of Residency, call upon the Israeli public to join us in demanding that our government desist from denying residency rights in the Occupied Territories to Palestinians or persons of Palestinian descent with foreign passports, as well as to foreign professionals contributing to the welfare of the Palestinian population. .

Dr. Pappe's opening remark on November 8, 2006, still sends chills though me, "On March 10, 1948, eleven men had a fateful meeting in the Red House headed by Ben Gurion. The eleven decided to expel one million Palestinians from historical Palestine. No minutes were taken, but many memoirs were
written about that fateful meeting. A systematic ethnic cleansing of
Palestine began and within seven months the Zionists managed to expel one half of all the Palestinian people from their villages and towns."

It is true that Zionism did not seek to dominate the natives. It simply wanted to displace them and replace them with settlers. This system is known as settler colonialism. In settler colonialism, the native population is removed, to make room for settlers and their new society. The basic principle used to justify it in both Israel and South Africa is the definition of some natives as foreigners and some foreigners as the real natives. That is how we came to have displaced Palestinian Arabs. This system has nothing to do with the occupied territories. It exists in Israel in its pre-1967 borders, in Tel Aviv, and in the Galilee. It is just possible that using such forbidden words as "colonialism" may get us further in understanding why most Israelis don't want to go back to the old borders, and why they feel a certain empathy for South Africans

There is a fatal contradiction at the heart of Pappe’s advocacy of the immediate return of all Palestinian refugees as the necessary condition of peace. If Israelis are really as vicious as Pappe presents them, then Palestinians could not possibly want to live among them. Are Palestinians to return only to wipe out Israelis or to be wiped out themselves? Poor Palestinians, poor Israelis, to be mobilised for such fates. And should Hamas, the PLO or President Ahmadinejad make good on threats to eliminate Israel, there will not be time to rescue Pappe from the consequences of his moral snobbery and his Marxism, or to discover whether he really applauds his own Raus mit Uns demise.

On the 58th anniversary and in preparation for the 60th anniversary we – Palestinians, Israelis and whoever cares for this land – should demand that the 1948 crime against humanity be included in everyone’s history books so as to stop the present crimes from continuing before it is too late.

The University of Haifa currently offers a propaganda indoctrination course based on one-sided propaganda being taught as "scholarship". It is in the Department of Sociology and is entitled "The Sociology of the Occupation". It is taught by an anti-Zionist lecturer who is probably the Hamas' second-favorite lecturer at the University of Haifa: Dr. Yuval Yonay. Yonay is a close collaborator with Ilan Pappe, including in promoting boycotts of Israel and "divestment". He helped to organize a series of "Nakba Days" at the University of Haifa with Pappe, in which Israelis were called upon to mourn the creation and very existence of their own country as a "catastrophe" (nakba, in Arabic).

- He speaks twice of 'mass killings' committed by Israel. Where exactly? If there's a genocide in Gaza or the West Bank as there is, for example, in Darfur, I would have thought the media over the years might have reported it. Have I, an Irish academic in Middle East affairs, missed something all these years?
- I would be more open to his call if he were to follow his own advice and resign his post. If not, he seems to be claiming a right to speak that he would deny to his colleagues.

I am a regular visitor to the sites where on a daily basis the Israeli security apparatus abuses and tortures thousands of Palestinians. I can count on one hand the number of Israeli academics I have met in these locations.
The Irish academics would be much better advised to talk to members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who witness daily the callous policies of mass killings, ethnic cleansing, long-term imprisonment without trials, demolition of houses and expropriation of land; an endless list of barbarisation that can not be summarised by what Beiner euphemistically calls a problem of "human rights".

Otherwise, there can be no explanation to the fact that when the Syrian leader is publicly announcing that it was time for peace negotiations, the Israeli government insists that there is no partner for peace. Why? because he is an Arab? There can be no explanation to the fact that the Palestinian leader is constantly pledging himself to all the agreements and pacts signed with Israel, the Israeli government is saying he is no partner, since he cannot deliver the goods. Why?Because he is an Arab? And while demanding the Hamas government to recognize the State of Israel as a prerequisite to recognizing it, the bulldozers are working full steam to build more housing units in the West bank settlement, which the Israeli government is claiming will remain Israeli even after it withdrawals, in the long run, from other parts of the West Bank. What about the many thousands of Palestinians who live among those settlements? Will they be offered at least an Israeli citizenship, which the Jewish settlers, their forced neighbours, already maintain? Of course not: they belong to a different race. They will either have to leave, in an act of ethnic cleansing, or live in a newly created no man's land. The spirit of Apartheid will reign, either way.

We are having a terrible day today. while we were demonstrating at our regular WIB square, 30-40 people in all, we were bombed on both sides...Has Israel gone crazy or have we not noticed what a mad country we live in?...only someone from outside could put pressure on Israel to stop.

As Israel stands accused by Amnesty International of committing war crimes in Lebanon following its almost 5-week bombardment of that country, which left over a thousand civilians dead and almost a million displaced, a prominent Israeli historian at Haifa University revisits the formative period of the State of Israel to investigate the treatment of the indigenous Palestinians... In this controversial new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Ilan Pappe uses recently declassified archival sources to investigate the fate suffered by the indigenous population of 1940s Palestine at the hands of the Zionist political and military leadership, whose actions led to the mass deportation of over a million Palestinians from their cities and villages, .

There is a famous Zionist story about conquering the swamps in the Jezreal valley, and the story is celebrated as proof of Zionists conquering and making productive inhospitable land. Scientists, however, have recently determined that no such swamps ever existed. These particular stories, among many others that Israeli historians have recently investigated were found to be simply untrue. Katriel, when she confronted museum curators and tour guides with these facts found that, while they were familiar with such evidence, they rejected them as “academic” and not of “the people”. The pioneers that came to Palestine to create a “new society” in hostile and unproductive land is one of the most important and powerful myths that grounds the Israeli national narrative. Integral to these stories of pioneers conquering an inhospitable nature is the belief that Arabs, in contrast, were unable to make the land productive. The pioneering museums stress this vision of remaking the land where the Arabs couldn’t as another justification of rightful ownership.

Beit-Hallahmi: The second troubling feature is that it's impossible to understand Israel without recognizing its founding on this dispossession and exclusion of the native Arabs. According to Haifa University scholar Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, this original sin "haunts and torments Israelis; it marks everything and taints everybody." A settler colonialist mentality prevails in which equality for all simply lies outside the Israeli mindset. There is a certain logic here because "The injustice done to the Palestinians is so clear and so striking that it cannot be openly discussed..."
...
How does one face being "the last white settlers in Asia?" As Prof. Beit-Hallahmi observes, most Israelis avoid thinking about human rights anywhere in the Third World because that means thinking about Palestinian rights and "undermining the moral justification for Zionism."

Although what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians is horrible and terrible, it is still not genocide. The unfortunate fate of the Palestinians was well described by a late Israeli journalist. As long as Israel is not doing to the Palestinians, he said, exactly what the Nazis did to the Jews, everything else is permissible. This includes ethnic cleansing, mass killings, dispossession and occupation. It is bad enough and it is shameful that a state that pretends to represent the victims of the holocaust behaves in such a way.

The conventional Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing employed successfully in 1948 against half of Palestine’s population, and against hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank are not useful here. You can slowly transfer Palestinians out of the West Bank, and particular out of the Greater Jerusalem area, but you cannot do it in the Gaza Strip - once you sealed it as a maximum-security prison camp.

As with the ethnic cleansing operations, the genocidal policy is not formulated in a vacuum. Ever since 1948, the Israeli army and government needed a pretext to commence such policies. The takeover of Palestine in 1948 produced the inevitable local resistance that in turn allowed the implementation of an ethnic cleansing policy, preplanned already in the 1930s. Twenty years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank produced eventually some sort of Palestinian resistance. This belated anti-occupation struggle unleashed a new cleansing policy that still is implemented today in the West Bank.

"Without this, I don't have a life. I am scared. I am desperate," said Safran, 56, who was making anti-war signs in Hebrew, Arabic and English at a women's center in Haifa days before the July 29 protest. "This is what gives me the ability to cope, the hope that we can change, that our life has meaning."

The University of Haifa currently offers a propaganda indoctrination course similar to that offered by psychology at Tel Aviv University. It is in the Department of Sociology and is entitled "The Sociology of the Occupation", number 204.1025 B01.. It is taught by an anti-Zionist lecturer who is probably the Hamas' *second*-favorite lecturer at the University of Haifa. Dr. Yuval Yonay is a close collaborator with Ilan Pappe.

But there's a clear logic in the sanguinary Zionist madness. Israel, with a colonialist Jewish population of little more than 5 million people, faces 300 million Arabs and many hundred million more Muslims in the region, e.g. in Iran. The Zionist apartheid regime can therefore survive only by imposing what is, in the full sense of the word, a regime of terror over the peoples of the Middle East.

Ilan Pappe of the University of Haifa's political science department, a revisionist historian at the forefront of calls for a boycott of Israel, said that to divorce Zionism from Judaism it was necessary to refrain from using Zionist terminology. For example, you should not talk about a Jewish Diaspora. "The only diaspora is the Palestinians, therefore there is a need to adopt new language," he said.

In fact, Al-Shwaikh was arrested at the end of 1988, during the first intifada, and sentenced to 11 months in prison; he served most of the sentence in the Ketziot prison, for activity in the 'popular committees.' He did not confess to the activities attributed to him (incitement to strike, throwing rocks, painting slogans on walls).

Haifa University President Aharon Ben-Ze'ev called on Dr. Ilan Pappe, a staff member who supports the academic boycott on Israeli universities, to tender his resignation. "It is fitting for someone who calls for a boycott of his university to apply the boycott himself," Ben-Ze'ev said Monday...

The boycott against Bar-Ilan University is fully justified since this
university actively supports a college which is part of the settlement apparatus.
---Ron Kuzar

The device of external pressure should be employed to change a policy of destruction, expulsion and death. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was always oppressive and inhuman, but ever since October 2000, and particularly since April 2002, it became a horror story of abuse and callousness. Every passing day brings with it demolition of Palestinian houses, confiscation of land, poverty, unemployment, malnutrition and death. The trend is for worse to come, with a sense of an Israeli government that feels it has a ‘green light’ from the US to do whatever it wishes in the occupied territories (including the reoccupation of the Gaza Strip). This free license atmosphere has legitimized the discourse of transfer in Israel and could herald the making of another Palestinian Nakbah in the form of a partial or massive ethnic cleansing in Israel and in Palestine. Israel is also developing genocidal tendencies as the daily killing of Palestinians (including many children) has become a normal and accepted facet of life for most Israeli Jews. There is an urgent need to stop this suffering and prevent future Israeli plans of inflicting more massive and irreversible damage on the Palestinian people and their society.

The Panel on the need for all of us to be clear about what anti-Semitism is and is not: There is one reason above all others why a resolution of the Palestine problem, the cancer at the heart of international affairs, has remained beyond the reach of politics and diplomacy. Since the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust and Israel's unilateral declaration of existence in 1948 to the present, informed and honest debate about who must do what and why for justice and peace in the Middle East has not been possible throughout the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian world. Why not?
The short answer is fear - the fear of being accused of anti-Semitism for criticising the Zionist state of Israel, fear which Zionism has exploited brilliantly, to silence criticism and suppress debate. We will argue that this accusation or charge is not merely false and blackmail of a kind, but is itself anti-Semitic. We believe that exorcising the fear of being falsely accused of anti-Semitism is the absolute pre-requisite for the informed and honest debate which must take place if the cancer at the heart of
international affairs is to be cured before it consumes us all..."

Dr. Ilan Pappe, a senior lecturer at the University of Haifa who has
participated in all nine Nakba marches, told Haaretz that more Jews participate in the march each year, reflecting "a clear trend in Israeli civil society, which, unlike the establishment and successive Israeli governments throughout the decades, does not deny the Nakba."

Pappe is clearly and proudly an anti-Zionist-- he supports the so-called "right" of return, he supports divestment and sanctions against Israel, and he claims that the Zionist idea of Jews living as a majority in their own state is "racist" and can be used to justify any type of acts including
"genocide".

This is my country: Where conscientious citizens objecting to atrocities perpetrated in their name by generals, officers, and soldiers in active service and reserves, are pursuing their bringing to international justice for war crimes, since the Israeli justice system shuns its moral obligations (please read attorney Michael Sfard's op ed in Haaretz below). And where such citizens are threatened by a senior Likud MP Steinitz (a former colleague at my university - where else?) who attempts to legislate a "treason law," remindful of dark ages, whereby such conscientious citizens will be prosecuted and serve jail for their initiative

"...And the affected tears of
the so-called victims of the evacuation were once again this week drowned in the blood of Palestinians, murdered in cold blood by another member of the settlers crowd, for whom spilling the blood of innocent civilians is a rhetorical figure.
...
the ongoing suffering of the West Bank Palestinians, spending hours at road blocks and cut daily from their fields or schools by the evil wall dividing their land. Who would build the wall preventing the settlers from
murder, theft and hooliganism, blaspheming the name of the legacy of Judaism?"

In Israeli Football!
Well, in my country, in my town, last night, such scenes of hatred were seen big time: scenes which would not have put to shame the most radical assemblies of Neo-Nazis and other racist groups. Except that the targeted group was not Jewish, but Arab.

Here is an email that I received that provides information on possible connections of the Israelis to 9/11. This view is controversial but there are a number of interesting questions that remain about 9/11. The jury is still out on this issue but no serious investigation of 9/11 has addressed these and other issues, for example who profited on the stock market in the flurry of trading in airline stocks shortly before 9/11.

"Well, please note the date of this update. In my (currently boycotted by the AUT) university, a conference was held today, entitled "The Demographic Problem and the Demographic Policy of Israel," organized by the Herzl Institute for the Study of Zionism, The Reuven Hecht Estate, and the Chair for Geo-Strategy. In my update from April 12th, I have provided some links as to the identity of the carefully selective list of speakers in that conference:
Professor Yoav Gelber, Head of the Herzl Institute, University of Haifa
Professor Arnon Sofer
Mr Harry Zesler, representative of the Hecht Estate
Professor Yossi Ben-Artzi, Rector, University of Haifa
General (res.) Uzi Dayan, Head of the Zionist Council, initiator of the "Apartheid Wall"
General (res.) Herzl Gedge, Head of the Population Administration, Ministry of the Interior
Professor Sergio della Pergola, Head of Institute of Contemporary Jewry, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Dr Yuval Steinitz, Head of Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Security Committee (Likud), one of Likud MKs who opposed Sharon's "disengagement" plan.
Needless to say, no speaker who might express a contrary view.
Needless to say, no Arab speaker..."

But Avraham Oz doesn't know and doesn't bother to find out that "The Demographic problem of Israel" conference in Haifa University was not about The Arabs in Israel but about the periphery vs. the center.

we have to tolerate Ilan in order to protect the principles of free expression (without which no democracy can exist) and academic freedom (without which no university can exist). Ilan Pappe abuses these principles, and ought to be condemned, repeatedly, in the strongest possible terms. But for democratic and academic freedoms to protect anyone, they must also protect despicable people like Ilan.

Last Saturday I attended a very sad demonstration by a women's group called ZOCHROT (remembering [fem.]), which has organized, on the lawn of Rabin square in Tel Aviv, an installation representing the whole country from north to south. Each of us was asked to select a card bearing the name of a former Palestinian village destroyed or converted in 1948 (with a data of population numbers, and what happened to the village at that time and since) and place it on the "map" according to the coordinates marked on the sides of the lawn, thus creating together a chart of all the abandoned/ruined/obliterated villages. This was their very sad, but very powerful way of commemorating the Naqba. A quiet, sombre, and appropriate memorial service to a dispersed community, following weeks devoted to the commemoration of the holocaust of European Jewry, 60 years to the end of WWII, and the too many Israelis killed during the lasting war in the Middle East. None, I suppose, will see much point in dismantling the flourishing campus of my alma mater, Tel Aviv University, and reconstruct on its ruins the former Palestinian village of Sheikh Muaneis, on the lands of which it was built. But the persistent efforts by official Israeli ideology to make the sad memory of the former village totally obliterated is an evil practice. In that demonstration, Arabs and Jews joined together in remembering the injustice done to the Palestinian people, while trying to secure a national home for another persecuted nation. In attempting to find the sentiments uniting us, it never occurred to any of us present we should shun or boycott each other as part of our campaign for just and lasting peace, even though many of us in that gathering had different views regarding the strategy or tactics this campaign should take.

On the other hand, another Jewish speaker delivered a speech but from a rather secularist perspective. Professor Ilan Pappe from Haifa University in Israel criticized his country’s denial of the Palestinians’ right of return.
“The right to return is an admission by Israel of expelling Palestinians from their homeland,” he said, explaining Israel’s position. “They need to continue as a state … with a denial of what Israel has done in 1948,” which he labelled “ethnic cleansing.”
Pappe stated that Israel should not only acknowledge the fact that they have expelled Palestinians but should also take responsibility for what they did and grant Palestinians their right to return..

The sanctions and boycott, including that of the academia, will take place, if not this year, then next year. This is inevitable. This is beyond me or you - it has to do with the energy of good people abroad who were there when the Vitenamese needed them, when the South Africans needed them and when people in Latin America needed them. They will succeed eventually, despite the fact that this decision was overturned.

It was not overturned because it was 'stupid' as someone, obviously wiser than all of us, argued here, nor becasue of tactical mistakes. It was overturned because the Zionist state was using its usual mixutre of intimidation, manipualtion of Holocasut memory and money. This time they even had some help from within the more progressive camp in Israel. But evil does not prevail for ever and the efforts agaisnt it have to continue.

there was no Israeli response to racist, anti-Arab statements made by an Israeli university professor in a lecture at Haifa University. The professor, David Bukay, made several racist comments about Arabs, enraging Arab students in the class. As a result, an Arab student who expressed his disapproval of these statements was harassed. Moran Zelikovich wrote a story about the incident on 24 February in Yediot Aharonot entitled "Arab university students against racist lecturer".

"Dozens of Arab students demonstrated in front of Haifa University today protesting against a decision to summon their colleague before the disciplinary committee because he asked a lecturer to refrain from using anti-Arab racist statements and described him as 'a racist Arab'," Zelikovich wrote. "The professor, a university lecturer, said, 'the Arabs are only interested in sex and alcohol. They're fools who have contributed nothing to humanity.' The disciplinary committee will meet today to determine the steps to be taken against the student.

"The incident occurred about a month ago. The student alleges that during a lecture to students with the Political Science Department, David Bukay made anti-Arab, racist comments. In addition to saying, 'the Arabs are only interested in sex and alcohol,' he added that all wanted men should be rounded up, have guns put to their heads, and filmed, to show their foolishness.

Calling for a boycott of your own state and academia is not an easy decision for a member of that academia. But I learned how the concerned academic communities, worldwide, could mobilize at the right moment when I was threatened with expulsion by my own university, the University of Haifa, in May 2002. A very precise and focused policy of pressure on the university allowed me, albeit under restriction and systematic harassment, to purse my classes and research, which are aimed at exposing the victimization of the Palestinians throughout the years. This is a particular important avenue, as I am the only one who does it in my own university, and one of the few who does it in the country as a whole, and also because the university has a large community of Palestinian students, who are prevented by draconian regulations from expressing their anger and frustration at what had been, and is, done against their people.
These students have felt totally isolated since the university established close links with the security apparatuses in the country. The fact that the university is closely connected to the security services -- by providing postgraduate degrees -- is by itself not a crime, but as these are the agencies that exercise on a daily basis the occupation in the Palestinian areas, their presence in the campus means academia is significantly involved in perpetuating the evil.
As I learned from my own case, outside pressure is effective in a country where people want to be regarded as part of the civilized world, but their government, with their explicit and implicit help, pursues policies which violate every known human and civil right. Neither the UN, nor the U.S. and European governments, and societies, have sent a message to Israel that these policies are unacceptable and have to be stopped. It is up to the civil societies, through organizations like yours, to send messages to Israeli academics, businessmen, artists, hi-tech industrialists and every other section in that society, that there is a price tag attached to such policies.

On Tuesday, the University of Haifa's Herzl Center is holding a conference under the title "The Demographic Problem and Israel's Demographic Policy."

In an interview with The Jerusalem Post a few days ago, the university's Ilan Pappe, a senior lecturer in the department of political science, complained bitterly about the conference, which he said was being held under the title: "The Arabs as a Demographic Problem in Israel." He said he had "told [his] Arab students that they are a demographic problem and they now have to be careful, because the Jews don't like demographic problems."

Elaborating on the first of these charges, Pappe claimed in a letter to The Guardian, written in support of the boycott prior to the AUT vote, that the university's Arab students "are prevented by draconian regulations from expressing their anger and frustration at what had been and is done against their people."

Pressed to give concrete examples of these "draconian regulations," he offered the following three examples: First, Pappe said that Arab students guilty of breaking university rules are punished more severely than Jewish students who are similarly culpable. Arab students' chief offense, he said, was waving the Palestinian flag on campus.

Second, he said Arab students have been forbidden since the year 2000 to stage political demonstrations on campus. (Pappe acknowledged that Jewish students have been equally forbidden to stage demonstrations.)

And third, he said that Arab students have not been allowed to erect a Christmas tree on campus.

Regarding Pappe's claim that the university closed its theater department, several sources at the university, including the dean of the Faculty of the Humanities and the chair of the theater department, told the Post that the theater department had never closed down and is active.

The AUT’s decision to reconsider its motions on the academic boycott of Israel seems to confuse procedure and principle. I am not a trade union activist, neither am I a British citizen, but I understand there may – or may not – have been procedural and even tactical errors in the way the decision was taken. Either way, these issues cannot be the focus of the debate over sanctions and boycott. Judging by the amount of time spent – especially by the opponents of the new AUT policy – on debating procedural matters and tactics, there is a risk of the wider public losing sight of the main issue, namely the need to apply external pressure on Israel as the best means of ending the worst occupation in recent history.

Pappe thinks that a boycott should be imposed on Israeli academia, but not because of him; he's just an excuse, a tactical ploy on the part of the British professors ("a legitimate ploy," he says).
A general boycott is necessary because there is a moral imperative to end the occupation and only outside pressure, like the pressure that was exerted on the apartheid regime in South Africa, can perhaps achieve this. And why academia? Because Israeli academia, in Pappe's view, is also a mouthpiece of the establishment and is used to enable Israel to present itself abroad as "the only democracy in the Middle East." Therefore, he believes, it is both permissible and ethical to impose a boycott on it.
"For me, as a historian, what the Jews said, what the Arabs said and what the hints in the IDF archive said - are enough for me to be able to say with deep conviction that there was a massacre in Tantura. Not everyone has to accept it, but that's true in regard to every historic event.

In actual fact, during the past few years, Dr. Pappe has transgressed all common ethical standards of academic life. Yet, despite his conduct, the University of Haifa has demonstrated extraordinary tolerance. One of his colleagues did indeed lodge a complaint with the internal faculty disciplinary committee. The complaint focused on Dr. Pappe's unethical behavior towards his peers and his efforts to disbar them from international forums for daring to contradict his views. Contrary to Dr. Pappe's claim, the university made no attempt to expel him.

As to the now too famous thesis that provoked this altercation, an
independent committee was asked to examine the validity of the quotes that were used as the "scientific basis" for the highly controversial charges proffered in this thesis, authored by Mr. Teddy Katz. After a thorough examination, the committee members concluded that, in fact, the quotes in the written text did not match the taped comments of the interviews and that the text was grossly distorted. Therefore, they disqualified this MA thesis. This decision, it is important to note, matched a court decision given on the same matter. As Dr. Pappe did not like the committee decision, despite the undeniable discrepancies between the text and the taped interviews, he reacted by calling the academic community to boycott the members of this committee and the University of Haifa. Despite these violations of academic collegiality and ethics, Dr. Pappe was never summoned by the disciplinary committee as the committee's chairperson decided not to pursue the complaint that had been filed against him....
The University of Haifa calls upon the AUT to rescind its resolution, one that represents a complete distortion of facts far more embarrassing to the AUT than to the University. We call upon the academic community throughout the free world to reject this politically motivated abuse of academic discourse.

As someone who is strongly opposed to Israel's behavior towards the Palestinians in the territories as well as its misconduct of its Arab citizens, I would like to make the following points:
1. While I do find some similarities between South-Africa's apartheid and Israel's conduct in the occupied territories, I do not find the AUT boycott to be similar to that imposed on South-African universities.
The latter was part of a total embargo - diplomatic, economic, cultural,and educational - a concerted effort of the international community to force SA to abandon apartheid. Had there been a total international embargo on Israel to force it to abandon the occupation of the territories, I would have supported that embargo, including the boycott of Israeli Universities (all of them).

Pappe: I appeal to you today to be part of a historical movement and moment that may bring an end to more than a century of colonisation, occupation and dispossession of Palestinians. I appeal to you as an Israeli Jew, who for years wished, and looked, for other ways to bring an end to the evil perpetrated against the Palestinians in the occupied territories, inside Israel and in the refugee camps. I devoted all my adult life, with others, creating a substantial peace movement inside Israel, in which, so we hoped, academia will play a leading role. But after 37 years of endless brutal and callous oppression of the people of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and after 57 years of colonisation and dispossession of the Palestinians as a whole, I think this hope is unrealistic and other means have to be looked at to end a conflict that endangers peace in the world at large.

Had Israel not existed, the United States could have opened new avenues in its relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds. True, the United States has its own agenda that is often in direct confrontation with these societies, but it needs urgently to engage in a dialogue based on mutual respect. This dialogue fails to emerge because Israel regards such a shift as an existential threat. Many people have already died because an understanding did not materialize, and many more will die if the current U.S. and Israeli agenda in the Middle East continues to fuse into a uniform anti-Arab and anti-Islamic strategy.
Much of the harm done by Israel cannot be repaired.

And had the soldiers not been abducted, the Israelis would have chosen another incident, a different incident, to unleash their forces in what they think is a moment of historical opportunity. But I think we all are going to learn that they were wrong, and the price we are all going to pay is going to be very high for this adventurous and reckless policy.

Not to be undone, Dr. Ilan Pappe of Haifa University, who some have named “the Noam Chomsky of Israel,” gave his own gloss on history, .... He selectively ignored the historically recognized fact that 80 percent of the Palestine promised to the Jews as their national home by Lord Balfour was lopped off by Winston Churchill in 1922 and given to the Arabs as the kingdom of Trans-Jordan. Dr. Pappe’s heavily sardonic tone served to portray Israel in the worst possible light as a blunt force riding roughshod over liberty-loving Palestinians. He privileged the Palestinian right of return, while contradictorily insisting that nationalism was even a more baleful force in the world than religion itself. ... ”

'Wiesel is often quoted as saying that "the opposite of love is not hate; it is indifference." He has devoted his life to carefully crafting articles and speeches about oppression, genocide, and man's inhumanity to man. Yet when asked about the oppression and dehumanization of Palestinians by Israel, he "abstains" and dismisses the subject claiming "I cannot say bad things about Jews," or "Such comparisons are unworthy."
His eloquent, unwavering support of Zionism has caused him to condemn Palestinians, who are the victims of the colonial expansionism epitomized by the illegal settlement of over 420,000 Jews in the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He degrades Palestinians with racist remarks, such as claiming they use their children as shields for adults throwing stones and worse.'

Pappe: The Palestinian case is paradoxical. The people who live there can see the results of 56 years of continuous ethnic cleansing, discrimination, a whole legal and practical apparatus that is the definition of apartheid. And yet within the media, the academy, and even the public consciousness, Israel is 'the only democracy in the Middle East'. Nothing of this reality seems to reach journalists, academics, and therefore the public. The reason is that our society is very well protected by these mechanisms of denial. Even very good-hearted Israelis who consider themselves to be part of the peace camp live in denial. There are various mechanisms, going back historically.

"If Israelis know about oppression, it is mostly from the
oppressor’s end of the gun sight."

'All Israelis have come to recognise Zionism’s original sin against the Palestinians. The terrible secret of the injustice is known to everybody, but cannot be openly faced. The awareness of the terrible injustice committed to create the state, and the pressure against discussing it openly, disfigure and warp any kind of moral discourse in Israel… '

The balance of power in Palestine since 1948, and particularly since 1967, has convinced me that, as in the case of other colonialist enterprises, the change from within the occupier’s society was a key factor in altering an oppressive situation on the ground....
The so-called ‘peace process’ was based on the assumption that a tangible transformation of the occupier’s mentality and policy could be affected. In reality, the diplomatic manoeuvres played into the hands of the Israeli occupiers. This meant that the most brutal occupation in the second half of the twentieth century has been kept intact-and will be so for the foreseeable future-while the world will continue to talk about ‘windows of opportunities’ which have opened since Yasser Arafat’s death. This sad event will not contribute to ending the occupation, since the occupier has been spared any meaningful outside pressure directed at making it alter its oppressive policies and warning against future plans of further ‘ethnic cleansing’ and destruction......
I personally identified strongly with Haim Bresheeth’s analysis of the turning point in his political understanding of the essence of the Zionist project: much worse than that of the apartheid, as it is meant to destroy the Palestinian people.

A group of professors and other faculty members, mainly from the University of Haifa, and some communist party members, have published a petition (available in full in Hebrew at http://list.haifa.ac.il/pipermail/alef/attachments/20041213/eebefb1f/attachment-0001.dot

The intifada is the result of Palestinians’ frustration [with] the intolerable gap between the discourse of peace and reconciliation and the actual reality on the ground. While the diplomats involved in the 1993 Oslo accords were talking about peace and independence, on the ground the occupation continued. In fact, it became worse — more settlements were built, more roadblocks were introduced and the Israeli policy in general became harsher and more cruel.

"Pappe refuses to acknowledge the meaning and purposes the modern political phenomenon of Zionism was created to address. These included support for the right of all Jews to live in their ancient homeland; and the Jewish people's national right to self-determination and freedom from
oppression.... For Pappe, Zionism is indistinguishable in practice from "ethnic cleansing."
and "Terrorism is not the essential question," Pappe said. "Israel expelled the Palestinians and colonized the area," acts "far worse than suicide bombing and armed struggle."

"Don't you understand Arab culture?" she demanded. "I know that Arabs are brought up to hate Jews as I was. They drink it in with their mother's milk. How can you ignore or deny this as the source of the conflict?" Pappe could take no more. He left the room, his shoulders hunched as though weighted down by the burden of guilt he feels all Israelis should carry or by the facts that keep intruding on and challenging his utopian vision.

The discrimination policy stems from the authorities' official approach and enjoys Jewish public support. The explanation provided for this policy and the support it enjoys among the Jewish public can be summarized in the following points: (1) the Arabs are a hostile minority that must be watched closely; (2) the Arabs should be grateful for the progress they have enjoyed since 1948; (3) Israel is the state of the Jewish people, a Jewish-Zionist country in which the Arabs should suffice with limited individual rights and not demand recognition as a national minority; (4) the Arabs are a new minority, devoid of any connection to the Palestinian people; and (5) the Arabs must accept that they are not part of the country's centers of power and decision-making.

The vast majority of Arabs rejects these arguments, and struggles in the Knesset and beyond to change this approach and the policies based on it. Most call for total equality and a solid anti-Zionist policy; they seek communal equality that finds expression in equal treatment by the state, full integration, and cancellation of the state's official ideology, which they believe is the decisive cause of their mistreatment. In other words, they want to turn Israel (within the green line) into a binational state.

"Ilan Gur-Zeev defines the Zionist claim for uniqueness of the
Holocaust as "immoral" because it denies others' (particularly the Palestinians') holocausts and genocides. Despite their differences, Gur-Zeev joins Pappe in a highly tortuous attempt to show that the Jews have transferred to
the Palestinians what the Nazis did to them."

The expulsion plan worked very smoothly exactly because there was no need for a systematic chain of command that had to check whether a master plan was fully implemented. Anyone who has done any research on ethnic
cleansing operations in the second half of the 20th century knows that this is exactly how ethnic cleansing is achieved

"Ilan Pappe was charged for his wholly uncollegial remarks. Whether such remarks merit severe disciplinary action leading up to expulsion is debatable. So, too, is it debatable whether Pappe should have been charged for going abroad many times last year during the semester without seeking
permission, flouting classroom responsibilities, without seeking
permission--an elementary obligation that is observed by all, high and low, in this university. If Ilan wants to sign a petitition calling for a boycott, probably the most counter-productive move possible, this is his business. Personally, I question his presumption of moral superiority, to pretend to silence others while he claims to be a victim of silencing
himself."

Responding yesterday, Katz said he will not comment until he submits a revised version of his work to Haifa University. He indicated, however, that he does not believe there have to been anything wrong with taking money from Husseini.

Alek D. Epstein: The works of Sammy Smooha, especially his pioneering essays on the status of Arabs in Israel, reveal the beginnings of a more radical approach. Smooha directed his criticism not only at the political establishment, but at the very idea of a Jewish state.

"According to Oren Yiftachel, the dispossession of the Palestinians and their characterization as enemies of the state are direct results of Zionist ideology."

Colonialism is a system under which, in a defined territory, nonnatives are entitled to political rights which natives are denied. That is exactly what Zionism had in mind in regard to the natives (without quotation marks) of Palestine and that is exactly what we have today in Israel

It is little surprise that in the body of the book Beit-Hallahmi
includes such falsehoods as the claim that Israeli Arabs are excluded from over 90 percent of the land, and that when Israeli-Arabs build their own homes in Israel the constructions are considered illegal and they are. Both these claims are nonsense, and it is astounding to hear them from an Israeli
who can easily witness legal, large-scale Arab building merely by taking a 10 minute drive in his car. Beit-Hallahmi also falsely claims that the rights to free speech, freedom of association and freedom of religion do not exist in Israel.

Urgent warning: The Israeli government may be contemplating crimes against humanity.

We call upon the International Community to pay close attention to events that unfold within Israel and in the Occupied Territories, to make it absolutely clear that crimes against humanity will not be tolerated, and to take concrete measures to prevent such crimes from taking place.

One Year Later: Remembering Edward Said
ILAN PAPPE, The Electronic Intifada, 27 September 2004

Frustrating more than anything else is recalling how in the last months of his life, Said predicted/warned ominously that Palestine is lost. The Israeli atrocities, the total collapse of the West Bank infrastructure, the disintegration of law and order in the Gaza strip and the continued Arab indifference and world apathy, bit by bit made this prognostication a reality.